Events

Sunday, September 15 2013

Before and during the Civil War, Confederate guerrillas – men like William Clarke Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and Frank and Jesse James – battled federal troops and Jayhawker irregulars along the Missouri-Kansas border.

That brutal era comes to life in Guerrillas in Our Midst, an original exhibit of drawings and photographs from the Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections. It covers not only the war but also its aftermath, when former bushwhackers like the James brothers turned to outlawry.

Begun in 1942 to address labor needs in agriculture and the railroads, the U.S. government’s bracero program became the largest guest worker program in U.S. history, with hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers providing manpower from World War II through 1964.

Bittersweet Harvest, a new bilingual exhibition organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, examines the experiences of Bracero workers and their families, providing rich insight into Mexican-American life and historical background to today’s debates on immigration and guest worker programs.

Hixon transformed the field of portrait photography in Kansas City and the surrounding region during a career that spanned more than seven decades. His studios—the first in the Brady Building at 11th and Main Streets, and the second just one block west in the Baltimore Hotel—welcomed thousands of patrons throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

A recent global survey rated residents of the Eastern Himalayan country of Bhutan as the happiest in Asia. Experience the smells, tastes, and sounds of Kansas City’s Bhutanese community with an afternoon of poetry, music, dance, visual art, and food.

Though far from the fashion center of New York, Kansas City once boasted a large, vibrant garment manufacturing industry. During its heyday in the early-to-mid twentieth century more than 4,000 workers were engaged in the business, and one in seven American women owned a garment designed and made in Kansas City.

Ann Brownfield, curator of the Kansas City Garment District Museum, examines this important piece of local industry in a discussion of her new book We Were Hanging by a Thread.